IT managers spend a surprising amount of time looking for information. An employee reports an issue in Teams. A project approval gets buried in email. Someone raises a security concern during a meeting, but the follow-up never makes it into the ticketing system.
The information is usually there. Finding it, figuring out what’s important, and keeping track of what needs to happen next takes time away from other work.
At Xantrion, we use Microsoft 365 Copilot to help manage these everyday tasks. It gives our IT team a faster way to review communications, find technical information, prepare for meetings, and keep projects moving. It also helps us turn the information we already have into something useful.
We’ve put together 10 prompts that show how we use Copilot in our daily work. They’re practical examples you can adapt for your own IT team, whether you’re managing internal systems, supporting employees, or coordinating with outside providers.
1. Start the Day with a Prioritized IT Briefing
IT priorities can change overnight. A service interruption, urgent access request, or escalation from a department leader may need attention before anything else on your calendar.
Instead of reading through every email and Teams conversation to figure out where to start, we ask Copilot to identify what needs our attention.
Our prompt:
Review my emails, Teams messages, and meetings from the last 24 hours. Identify anything requiring my attention today, including outages, security concerns, user escalations, approvals, and overdue follow-ups. Prioritize them by urgency.
This gives us a useful starting point for the day. We can quickly review potential priorities, catch requests that came through informal conversations, and decide what needs immediate action.
It’s especially helpful after a busy day or when returning from time away.
2. Turn Communications into an Action List
IT tasks don’t always start with a support ticket. Someone asks for a configuration change in Teams, a department manager requests new equipment during a meeting, or a vendor sends an email that requires follow-up.
Those requests are easy to lose track of when they’re spread across different conversations.
Our prompt:
Review my emails, Teams chats, and meeting recaps from the last 7 days. Create a consolidated list of IT action items, including the task, owner, deadline, source, and current status.
Copilot helps us collect those commitments into a single list so we can see what’s outstanding, who’s responsible, and where we need clarification.
We can then move relevant items into our ticketing or project management systems, rather than relying on email threads and meeting notes to keep work organized.
3. Research an IT Issue
When something breaks, there’s a good chance someone has seen a similar problem before. The challenge is finding out what happened, what was tried, and whether anyone found a solution.
That information might be in a troubleshooting document, an old Teams conversation, or an email exchange with a vendor.
Our prompt:
Search our internal documentation, emails, Teams discussions, and meeting notes for references to [issue/error/system]. Summarize what we know, troubleshooting already attempted, known fixes, and unresolved questions.
This gives us a better understanding of the issue before we start troubleshooting from scratch.
It’s useful for recurring application errors, intermittent connectivity problems, or systems with a long history of configuration changes. We can see what previous investigations uncovered and identify potential solutions worth testing.
We still need to confirm that older information applies to the current environment, but having that history readily available can make the investigation more productive.
4. Prepare for an IT Meeting
Moving between projects means keeping track of a lot of details. A meeting might cover an infrastructure upgrade you haven’t discussed in two weeks, a vendor implementation with several unresolved questions, or a project waiting on management approval.
Before those conversations, we use Copilot to catch up on the latest information.
Our prompt:
Prepare me for my next meeting about [project/system]. Summarize recent decisions, open issues, action items, deadlines, and anything I committed to completing.
Instead of searching through old meeting notes and emails, we get a summary of where things stand and what needs to be addressed.
This helps us arrive prepared, especially when several people are involved in a project and decisions have been made across multiple conversations.
5. Create a Post-Meeting Recap
Meetings are productive when people leave knowing what was decided and what happens next. Unfortunately, it’s easy for assignments, deadlines, and technical details to get lost once everyone returns to their regular work.
We use Copilot to turn meeting information into a structured recap.
Our prompt:
Summarize this IT meeting into decisions, technical issues discussed, action items, owners, deadlines, and unresolved questions. Separate confirmed decisions from ideas that were only discussed.
That last instruction matters. A proposed system change isn’t necessarily an approved change, and discussing an approach doesn’t mean someone agreed to implement it.
Separating confirmed decisions from ideas helps us maintain an accurate project record. After reviewing the recap, we can share it with participants and use the action items to update our project tracking.
6. Find Internal IT Instructions
Most IT teams have accumulated years of documentation. Some procedures live in SharePoint, others are buried in emails, and a few may exist only in Teams conversations between experienced administrators.
Finding the right instructions can be harder than the task itself.
Our prompt:
Search our corporate files, Teams messages, emails, and meeting transcripts for instructions on how to [task]. Give me the most current procedure, including prerequisites, steps, exceptions, and who provided the guidance.
This helps us locate relevant instructions without searching each location separately.
It can be particularly useful for infrequent administrative tasks, application-specific procedures, and troubleshooting steps that aren’t part of someone’s regular routine.
Of course, finding instructions doesn’t mean they’re still correct. We verify procedures before using them, especially when they involve permissions, security settings, or production systems.
7. Find Unresolved Security Work
Security issues don’t always arrive through a security platform. An employee might mention a suspicious email in Teams. A manager may request an access review. A meeting could uncover an outdated system that needs attention.
Even when those concerns are documented somewhere, they still need to be assigned and followed through.
Our prompt:
Review my recent emails, Teams messages, and meeting recaps for cybersecurity-related requests or concerns that still appear unresolved. Group them by identity and access, endpoints, Microsoft 365, vulnerabilities, compliance, and other security issues.
We use this to look for security-related discussions that may need additional attention.
Grouping the results helps us distinguish between different types of work and identify where follow-ups may be missing.
Copilot isn’t a security monitoring tool, and it can’t tell us whether every risk has been addressed. We use it alongside our established security processes to help make sure concerns raised through everyday communications receive appropriate follow-up.
8. Explain a Technical Issue to Leadership
Business leaders generally want to understand what happened, how operations are affected, what IT is doing about it, and whether they need to make a decision.
They don’t necessarily need a detailed explanation of every troubleshooting step.
We use Copilot to help turn technical information into an update that addresses those questions.
Our prompt:
Using the available information about [issue/project], write a short executive update explaining what happened, business impact, what IT has done, remaining risk, and next steps. Avoid unnecessary technical jargon.
This is useful when reporting on an outage, a delayed implementation, a security concern, or a significant system change.
It gives us a starting draft that we can review for accuracy and adjust for the audience. When an investigation is ongoing, we make sure the update distinguishes what we’ve confirmed from what we’re still working to understand.
9. Draft Employee Communications
Employees need straightforward information when IT makes a change. Whether we’re introducing a new security requirement, scheduling maintenance, or addressing an outage, people want to know what’s happening and what they need to do.
Writing those announcements takes time, particularly when the underlying information is technical.
Our prompt:
Using the latest internal information about [change/outage/security issue], draft a concise employee communication explaining what is changing, when it takes effect, what employees need to do, and where they should go for help.
Copilot helps us turn technical notes into clear instructions that employees can understand and act on.
We review the draft to confirm dates, technical details, and support information before sending it. For more significant changes, we can also ask Copilot to adjust the message for different groups, such as department managers or employees directly affected by the change.
10. Prepare a Weekly IT Status Report
A useful weekly IT report should show what’s been accomplished, what remains in progress, and where the team needs help.
Gathering that information can be tedious when updates are scattered across project documents, emails, meeting notes, and Teams conversations.
Our prompt:
Review this week’s emails, Teams conversations, meetings, and relevant documents. Create an IT status report covering completed work, active projects, incidents, security items, important decisions, risks/blockers, and priorities for next week.
Copilot gives us an initial report that brings together the week’s activity.
We can review it against our ticketing, project management, and security systems, add any missing information, and focus our attention on the decisions or concerns that deserve discussion.
It’s also a useful way to maintain a consistent reporting format from week to week.
A Few Tips for Getting Better Results From Copilot
The prompts above are a good starting point, but you don’t have to use them word for word. In fact, you’ll usually get better results when you adjust them to match the information you’re looking for and the way your organization works.
Here are a few habits worth building into your Copilot workflow.
Give Copilot Enough Context
Be specific about the system, project, time period, or issue you want to investigate. If you’re troubleshooting an application error, include the exact error message. If you’re preparing for a meeting, identify the project and the people involved.
A focused question helps Copilot narrow its search and provide a more relevant response.
Ask Where the Information Came From
When Copilot identifies an action item, technical issue, or internal procedure, ask for links to the original messages or documents.
This lets you check the source, confirm details, and follow up with the people involved. It’s particularly valuable when decisions depend on information from several different conversations.
Don’t Let Copilot Fill in the Blanks
If a task doesn’t have an assigned owner, Copilot should say so. If a deadline hasn’t been established, it shouldn’t invent one.
You can add instructions such as “Identify missing information” or “Separate confirmed facts from assumptions” to almost any of these prompts.
That makes the results more useful and reduces the chance of treating an AI-generated assumption as an established fact.
Ask for the Format You Need
For action items, a table with columns for the task, owner, deadline, and status is usually easier to review than a narrative summary.
For executive updates, a few short paragraphs may work better. Technical investigations may benefit from separate sections for symptoms, troubleshooting history, and unresolved questions.
Tell Copilot how you plan to use the information so it can organize the response accordingly.
Refine the Answer with Follow-Up Questions
You don’t need to fit everything into one prompt.
If Copilot gives you a lengthy summary, ask it to focus on the most urgent items. If it finds several references to a technical issue, ask it to compare the findings or identify which information is most recent.
Treat the first response as the beginning of the process. A few follow-up questions can help you get to the information you actually need.
Verify Important Details
Copilot can make mistakes, overlook relevant information, or surface documentation that’s no longer current.
Review its output before making technical decisions, changing configurations, approving requests, or sharing sensitive information. For incidents and security concerns, confirm findings against the appropriate management and monitoring systems.
We use Copilot to help gather and organize information. The responsibility for evaluating that information and taking action remains with our team.
Microsoft also keeps a gallery of general Copilot prompts organized by business function. None of them are IT-specific, but a few are worth adapting.
Make sure your Microsoft 365 environment is ready
These prompts work best when your information is organized, accessible to the right people, and reasonably up to date.
Microsoft 365 Copilot uses the permissions already established in your Microsoft 365 environment. If documents in SharePoint or other locations have overly broad access permissions, Copilot may make that information easier to find.
That’s why we recommend reviewing permissions, information sharing practices, and data governance before expanding Copilot across an organization.
It’s also worth understanding which information Copilot can access. Depending on your licensing and configuration, it may be able to reference Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and other Microsoft 365 content. However, it won’t automatically have access to every help desk platform, monitoring tool, or third-party application your IT team uses.
Start with a few practical tasks, check the quality of the results, and address any gaps in access or documentation as you go.
Put Copilot to Work for Your IT Team
The examples above reflect a simple approach to using AI: start with tasks your team already handles every day.
For us, that means using Copilot to find information, prepare for meetings, organize follow-ups, and communicate more clearly. These are routine responsibilities, but they can consume a substantial amount of an IT manager’s time.
If your organization already uses Microsoft 365, you may have opportunities to make some of that work more efficient. The right place to start depends on your existing systems, security requirements, and the processes that take the most time.
Xantrion helps organizations assess their Microsoft 365 environments, address security and governance requirements, and identify practical ways to use AI in their operations.
Interested in putting Microsoft 365 Copilot to work for your organization? Contact Xantrion to discuss your AI readiness and where Copilot could provide the most value for your team.
Looking for a service desk that pairs smart automation with responsive, human support? Discuss your support requirements with Xantrion.
